If you have the stomach for it, pick a night when the Washington Wizards have a game at the same time as another game between pretty much any two other NBA teams, even really shitty ones like the Phoenix Suns or New York Knicks, and spend some time toggling back and forth between the two every few minutes. The effect…

The hackneyed image of an NBA player taking time after an arena has emptied out to practice getting his shots up becomes a story at least once a season for teams that are failing to meet expectations, or just generally struggling. Fresh off a 115-104 home loss to the Nets that put the Wizards at 5-10, Dwight Howard…

The pestilential Wizards lost last night, again, bringing their record this season to a pitiful 2-8. Terminally unfunny center Dwight Howard—whose teammatesuniversally cannot stand him—is back from a butt injury, and the Wizards are in such a sorry state of internecine bickering that Howard is the man who has been…

As a general rule, garbage time is unfun to watch—just a bunch of guys scrimmaging out in the public sphere, the actual game long reduced to a formality. The large exception to that rule is named Boban. There will never be a time when 7-foot-3 center Boban Marjanovic is on a basketball court and doesn’t bring a better…

With the Wizards and Trail Blazers tied in the final seconds of regulation, Portland had the last shot. Damian Lillard brought up the ball for a high pick-and-roll with Jusuf Nurkic. Seth Curry nestled himself deep in the left corner. And Markieff Morris, who was not closing this one out for the Wizards, saw an…

Dwight Howard hasn’t played yet. He’s out with, literally, a sore ass. The guy starting in his place, Ian Mahinmi, has played a total of 33 minutes in three games; he’s committed 10 fouls and made one shot. The guy backing him up, Jason Smith, has a minus-22 net rating in 44 minutes and is shooting 36-percent from the…

My friends, the Morris twins are extremely back on their bullshit. Last week Marcus Morris took the bait when Tristan Thompson ran his mouth about the LeBron-less Cavs still being the team to beat in the Eastern Conference. Also last week Markieff Morris felt it sensible to declare that the Boston Celtics, who…

As you may have heard, all of NBA media, and indeed pretty much all of the western world, came together yesterday to deride Washington Wizards all-star guard John Wall for, uh, proudly refusing to conform to our culture’s rigid expectations of what a successful professional male athlete must look like. Which is to say…

Team USA Basketball Camp starts today in Las Vegas, which means of bunch of the top American basketball players get to hang out under the watchful eye of Gregg Popovich—and also, apparently, one massively exhausted party animal will be there too. The Wizards tweeted out a picture from the camp that I’m told is a…

Why did the Wizards fade down the stretch last season and finish 10-15 after the All-Star break on their way to another first-round exit? Part of it was an injury to John Wall, part of it was their questionable depth, but an important reason was that they loathed each other. Exhibit A: Marcin Gortat’s unsubtle dig at…

The Wizards, who won 43 games during the regular season—that’s three fewer than the Denver Nuggets, who failed to make the playoffs in the much tougher Western Conference—and were the Eastern Conference’s 8th seed, were eliminated on their home floor by the Toronto Raptors Friday night.

So the Washington Wizards will not be swept by the Toronto Raptors. Friday night the Wizards got hot from the floor, survived several instances of their players being crabby, runaway buttheads, and grabbed Game 3 on their home court. Marcin Gortat shaved his mohawk; John Wall cooled it with the turnovers; Markieff…

Bradley Beal, like his team in general, is not having a good playoff series against the Toronto Raptors. Beal shot just 3-for-11 in Game 2, scoring just nine points and picking up four fouls en route to an atrocious plus-minus of -34 in 25 minutes. Overall, Beal is scoring 14 points per game and has only made three…

The late-model Washington Wizards are broadly competent, secretly mediocre, spotty, and more boring than they are not. They could be nutshelled as an equal and opposite reaction to their counterparts of a decade ago. Those Wiz teams, which weren’t better but sure were stranger, boasted a bigger collection of…